Wednesday, April 17, 2013

If I Were Writing Evil Ernie

Loneliness
isn't a question of physical proximity to other people. Ask anyone who
has ever lived in a big city or grew up significantly different in a
small-minded little town. You can be surrounded by people, even people
who know your name, and wind up feeling like the last person left on
earth.

That
kind of isolation can twist a person. I have a hard time believing that
there is a lot of pure sociopathic evil in the world. Instead, I
believe that the worst people in the world are the product of curdled
bitterness. People get despondent or mean, start seeing life in a
twisted way, and look for structures that support their newly-warped
perspective. It seems like living damnation to me.

So.
Pretend you're a sixteen year old kid. You're terrified of your violent
father, whom all the adults in your town seem love and admire. Nobody
in school likes you, you're too timid to stand up for yourself, and you
have no chance of ever getting laid.

Worse, you're psychic. Most people with no self-esteem simply imagine the terrible things people think about them. You get to actually hear it. You know that everyone around you can't stand being near you. Something about who you repulses them.

Sounds pretty hopeless, doesn't it?

Now
imagine that a magical woman visits you in your dreams. She's alabaster
white, she says that she loves you, and that she can make you the most
important person in the world. She will give you the sex that you've
always dreamed about and she will give you the power to return to the
world all the pain it has ever given you. And, once it's all done, you
will be king of everything. You aren't the
worthless weakling everyone said you were. You were different. You were
powerful.

Revenge
fantasies are nice. They're about the powerless regaining power, the
underdog working toward the kind of fairness real life seldom offers. We
tend to romanticize vengeance stories and ignore the innocent people
trampled underneath.

The
hook behind Evil Ernie is that he has to kill everyone in the world in
order for his lover to be reborn. In the meantime, everyone he kills
becomes one of his army. The newly-dead members of his revolting crusade
revere Ernie as something
between a rock star and a god. It's a zombie apocalypse where the
zombies are as intelligent as they are malicious.

The
universe of Evil Ernie is somewhere between superhero comic,
pro-wrestling jamboree, and slasher film. Ernie wages an endless war
against humanity and everything he takes over turns into a twisted
parody of itself. The baseball teams still play games, albeit with
severed heads as balls, young lovers go on romantic massacres, and
sitcom families argue about how best to carve
the thanksgiving victim.

There's
so much ripe material to cultivate in the Evil Ernie mythology. His
origin story is steeped in very human themes of isolation and madness,
his armies create a morbid carnival in its wake, and his world is full
of muscle-bound psychopaths and deranged soldiers and slinky vampire
angels. It never quite came together as a story under original creator
Brian Pulido's reign, as his reach often exceeded his abilities, but the
potential is there to refresh the zombie apocalypse subgenre. Or, at
least,
turn it into a delightful Looney Tunes cartoon.

Unfortunately,
all that good stuff has been jettisoned in the recent remake. Most of
the story seems to center around "Evil" Ernie (who's actually a fairly
nice emo boy) fighting his way though the prison his white trash father
is incarcerated in. Lots of family drama and emotional vacillating, not a
lot of gleeful over-the-top chaos. Original Halloween vs.
Rob Zombie's Halloween.

If
I were writing Evil Ernie, I'd stick close to the original ideas that
shaped the character. I like the idea that he's a weak, bullied kid
tormented by his peers and elevated by a twisted version of love.
There's always been a sense of ambivalence as to whether or not Lady
Death actually cares about him or if she's just using him to escape her
hellish prison. I would like to see that built on and expanded
further. Their relationship is operatic and high drama but they're both
insane supernatural psychopaths. People fall in love for all sorts of
reasons and some of them are very bad indeed.

I'd
also keep the trappings of the heavy metal universe Evil Ernie operates
in. Monster movie iconography, grinning skeletons, comically gory
abattoirs, blood, chrome, and viking bullshit. Brian Pulido definitely
drew on 80s metal icons. Evil Ernie looks like a cross between Pulido
himself and Iron Maiden's Eddie the Head icon. It's cool, but I like the
way the remake made him younger and smoothed out his hair. The
curly-haired metal guy look might be a little too 80s and making him
younger makes him more vulnerable and more likely to be suckered by Lady
Death's manipulations.

The
big mistake the remake made is trying to make Ernie too conventionally
sympathetic. He's a character of the id. We want to see him rampage and
cause destruction so long as it's safely confined to the page. It's fun
watching apocalyptic carnage from the monster's perspective. We
sympathize with him because we can understand the feelings that lead him
to become a monster. He's an outlet for us and he looks like he's
having a good time doing it.

I've
always felt that horror audiences secretly cheer the monster. They get
to cut loose in a way that we aren't allowed to. But the bizarre paradox
is that we demand the monster's destruction. We cannot allow evil to
remain free for long and we celebrate its demise. Ernie lives in a world
where the monsters win. Every evil thing that he does reshapes the
world in his own image. He creates a place where people love him, where
he doesn't have to be tormented or alone anymore.

A lot of
horror stories answer the nature vs. nurture question of evil squarely
on nature. Monsters do monstrous things because they are monsters. End
of story. Evil Ernie is an example of Nurture evil. He is the product of
cruelty. Obviously there's a limit to how much you can sympathize with a
mass murderer, but Evil Ernie is fascinating examination of the dark
side of giving power to the powerless.

(Note to all y'all: This is part of a series I write on my tumblr where I discuss how I'd write major comic book characters. If you'd like to read more, check out Cable, Dr. Strange, and Green Arrow.)